So with four hops, rtt would at most be 1200-2000 msec, if every hop were the maximum length. In practice, rtt for Tor is at most half that, and often even less. But latency is actually good if your goal is anonymity. Because it reduces the accuracy of traffic analysis.
With traditional onion sites, there are two three-relay circuits, one for the user and one for the site, plus a rendezvous relay. So rtt is much greater. However, sites can opt for one-relay circuits, sacrificing anonymity, so overall rtt isn't that bad.
Bandwidth is also reduced with Tor. Increased latency is part of that. But also, many relays have low-bandwidth uplinks, especially ones that people run at home. The Tor client does pick faster relays, but there's a tradeoff, in that doing so reduces anonymity. Increased investment in high-bandwidth relays would help a lot.
Also, with more relays, it would be workable to implement multipath circuits. Especially for onion sites, where precious exit relays aren't needed. Using MPTCP, I managed ~50 Mbps throughput for bbcp transfers between onion sites (with gigabit uplinks).[1] I was getting ~36 subflows per tcp connection.
0) https://www.ivpn.net/privacy-guides/how-to-verify-physical-l...
1) https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmUDV2KHrAgs84oUc7z9zQmZ3whx1NB6YDPv8ZR...
You can be arrested for things just by using Tor if they mix you up with someone else or something?
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/04/access-now-and-eff-con...
If you use tor and visit the regular web sites (like, say, HN), the last computer that does the actual request to the website is an exit node, as far as that site is concerned, the exit node made the http request. If you run an exit node, your computer is going to be doing tons of requests to all kinds of websites, this may include sites that deal in illegal stuff like drugs, child prostitution, human trafficking, terrorism, etc.
edit: Forgot to say, you must explicit be running an exit node. Not every tor node is an exit node.
For example: https://www.deepdotweb.com/2017/05/01/russian-tor-exit-node-... https://www.zdnet.com/article/dan-egerstads-tor-exit-nodes-g... https://www.pcworld.com/article/2452320/tor-exit-node-operat...
(Also check the new relay guide: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/TorRelayGuide)
But the sad truth is that there aren't that many hosting providers that allow Tor relays. Especially exit relays, because of abuse complaints.
Also, as you might expect, Tor relays can use lots of bandwidth. It's more common to get flat-rate bandwidth for 100 Mbps uplinks, and metered bandwidth for 1 Gbps uplinks. Digital Ocean, for example, just switched to metered bandwidth, and that has killed some relays.
However, all this could arguably change, if Tor became mainstream, as part of Firefox.
Run an exit node and then do something illegal. Then blame it on someone else.
So running an exit at home to coverup for posting on a forum that bans all Tor exits, that makes no sense.
Currently Tor looks like HTTPS done with TLS/1.2 on TCP (like regular HTTPS). As these newer protocols get more and more delpoyed Tor can start using them too which will help make Tor faster.
I don't know how much (if at all) it might help—but other, similar overlay networks have previously noticed that (intuitively) inefficiency in the transport protocol is likely to be (broadly speaking) multiplied by the number of hops; so any improvements in that might be useful in improving the user experience by using the same available resources more efficiently.
What that might mean for Tor's perceived speed is a somewhat murky issue, as that's a function of the complex interaction of latency and bandwidth and crypto and routing overhead of all the involved nodes in a tunnel put together; which of course is also shared with other tunnels; not to mention it will _also_ be particularly affected by exit node outproxy bandwidth; _and_ any possible packet loss and delay caused by both incidental _and_ deliberate adverse network conditions…